The case against Donald Trump brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is melting faster than the Wicked Witch of the West. The DA is keeping everyone in the dark about exactly what individual crime Bragg will try Trump on.
This is sort of important because, without a predicate crime, there’s nothing to convict Trump of doing anything illegal. Bragg has taken that crime and sliced it into 34 parts — a prosecutorial trick designed to make sure the jury convicts Trump of something — anything — to justify charging a former president with felonies.
And if Bragg wants to try Trump for violating federal campaign finance laws by trying to cover up the payment to Stormy Daniels, there’s only one itsy-bitsy problem with that.
The Federal Election Commission already investigated the hush money payment and found nothing illegal about it.
“It’s not a campaign finance violation. It’s not a reporting violation of any kind,” said FEC Commissioner James E. “Trey” Trainor.
With that as background, Trainor told Secrets today that it will be hard for a judge or jury to come up with a different conclusion since it’s the FEC and DOJ that prosecute federal campaign finance law. He reiterated that in a Tuesday tweet that showed the FEC hearing room, and he wrote, “This is where campaign finance violations are tried.”
“I don’t know how you get around the evidence that both the Department of Justice in their investigation of the federal campaign finance issues and the Federal Election Commission in their ultimate jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, neither of them found there to be any violations whatsoever, and I think the jury is going to see that and they’re going to have to rely upon the fact that both the law enforcement experts and the civil enforcement experts, as far as campaign finance are concerned, didn’t find any violation of the law here,” said Trainor.
Actually, a good question to ask Bragg is what is a local prosecutor doing sticking his nose in a federal campaign finance case — a case that was already investigated and judged not prosecutable.
For all the highfalutin speeches about the “rule of law” and “no one is above the law,” the fact is that Bragg failed to identify a predicate crime in the indictment. As Ed Morrissey points out, ” It’s not unusual to add counts to indictments after arraignments as investigations proceed, but it’s unheard-of to predicate misdemeanors into felonies on the basis of covering up another felony without naming the felony on which the other felony charges are predicated.”
The trial judge (it may not be Judge Juan Merchan) may end up throwing this case out for that and other reasons as Commissioner Trainor explains.
Trainor, a Texas-based election lawyer appointed by Trump, listed several reasons why the FEC decided not to take up the payment to Daniels in 2018. He also released a statement, shown below, that he and Commissioner Sean Cooksey wrote in April 2021 explaining why the FEC voted to dismiss the case.
First, he said, Cohen took the blame in his plea deal. “At the end of the day, there’s the person who committed the crime, and there’s the person who is behind bars because of it,” Trainor said of Cohen.
Second, the paperwork violation in question came well after Trump’s 2016 election, so it couldn’t have been done to help his election.
As Andrew McCarthy points out in the New York Post:
Alvin Bragg alleges that Donald Trump defrauded voters into electing him president on November 8, 2016.
Alvin Bragg also alleges that the first crime Donald Trump committed occurred on February 14, 2017.
Are you seeing the problem here?
If history is a guide, once the left fully realizes the stupendous errors in Bragg’s case, they will slowly back away and forget they even got excited about the indictment in the first place.
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